Design of situation: awareness solution to support infrastructure inspections

• Autor(a) principal: Vidal Quintans, Carme
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/26009
• topic: Interaction Design; Service Design Thinking; Information Visualization (Interactive Dashboard); User Interface; Data-as-a-Service

In this applied research, we tried to demonstrate how an interactive design approach, complemented with information visualization techniques, might contribute to reduce maintenance costs associated to inspections procedures, in particular by providing context-awareness about situations requiring the intervention of the decision maker. The business scenario is related to inspections performed in an industrial infrastructure, equipped with wind turbines. The goal is to mitigate operational costs associated to blade inspections, lessening the time to conclude each inspection without compromising the quality and level of accuracy of the work that has to be done in identifying possible safety breaches that may compromise the operability of the blades. In this domain, savings over 25% of the total cost per kWh produced might be achieved by decreasing the total time between performing an on-site blade inspection and the time a report with an expert (Inspector) diagnose is generated. The proposed solution also provides a way to keep all stakeholders well informed and aware about undergoing actions and the corresponding outcomes. By highlighting those situations requiring a further intervention, the proposed solution addresses a contribution to the sustainability in exploration of such critical infrastructures. This Thesis has conceptualized a solution for a digital cloud-based platform that based on autonomous drone technology to collect on-site data about blade inspections, is able to provide information to different stakeholders, enabling those who contracted the inspection services to follow undergoing, or programed actions, to be notified whenever their intervention is required. The proposed approach encompasses and supports business processes related to blade inspections. From a service-design perspective, a user-centred approach was followed to improve the User Experience (UX) in analysing events, complemented with information visualization techniques to streamline their interactions whenever required. The chosen methodology was an Agile Design Science Research Model (ADSR) applied to a specific business model that serves as a case study for demonstration of the theoretical framework.